Barclays has filed two patent applications relating to transfer of digital currency and data storage with the Indian Patent Office.

The bank has filed a patent application titled ‘secure digital data operations’ and its abstract describes it as method and system for transferring digital currency from a payer to the recipient. It also touches upon transmitting data through blockchain technology.

Barclays has also filed for a separate patent titled ‘data validation and storage’ and the abstract pointed to ‘cryptographically signing data corresponding with the data describing the first entity using at least a private key of the second entity’. “The referred technology is, in general, about enabling transaction in a digital currency/digital money/electronic currency/electronic money and more specifically about security mechanisms in digital currency namely authorisation, e.g. identification of payer or payee, verification of customer or shop credentials; review and approval of payers,” Lokesh .V, CEO and MD, Innomantra Consulting, an intellectual property research firm.

According to Innomantra, Barclays has filed about 70 patents pertaining to this area of technology across the globe. In 2016, Barclays became the first big British bank to form a partnership with a digital currency firm, social payments app Circle, which runs partly on bitcoin’s blockchain network.

“Blockchain is known to be a public database in which blocks containing an individual’s records are linked and secured using cryptography. Such records in any given block in the database cannot be altered in a retroactive manner without alteration of subsequent blocks,” Abhishek Sen, senior patent attorney, S. Majumdar & Co said.

Change in rules

He also pointed out that India had changed rules relating to computer-related inventions in 2017, prompting firms to file technology-related patents including in the area of blockchain…